


the stars are so distant from here

by SoulLidify



Series: with our hearts in your hands; we move forward [2]
Category: Aldnoah.Zero (Anime)
Genre: All Love Is Unrequited, Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Heavy Angst, Lemrina is bitter, Stand-alone oneshot, Unrequited Love, Wordcount: 100-1.000, and with good reason
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2015-08-02
Packaged: 2018-04-12 14:50:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4483499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SoulLidify/pseuds/SoulLidify
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lemrina understands this much.  Outside, the flashes of death and war twinkle like stars.  </p>
<p>OR,</p>
<p>Lemrina is a cripple, and life isn't fair.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the stars are so distant from here

**Author's Note:**

> Crossposted on ff.net under "Ice of the Kitsune's Fire".

Lemrina is a cripple. This is a disadvantage.

What people do not realize is that she understands more because of this. 

This is her one advantage, the one thing she has gained on her own without the pity or strategic aid of others. 

She understands why Slaine hid Asseylum’s awakening from her.  She understands why, right now, he is standing at the dark and abandoned place where her sister used to sleep, where she slumbered and dreamt impossible things while Slaine cried and cried over the living corpse of her body.

She understands why her sister is trying to achieve peace.  Because it is _her_ nature to care deeply, as only a sheltered, pretty princess could – only she could beg for such peace after so many bloody battles.  Asseylum Vers Allusia has never suffered and so she believes this way is the best way.   She is probably the only human on Vers who does not understand that you cannot save someone who does not want to be saved.

They’re all damned. All of them.  Asseylum is the only one who is going to get out of this unscathed, because that’s how her entire life has been.  Because in her wide, (limited) view of the universe, Lemrina understands this most of all: that life isn’t fair.  Her sister is going to prosper in that little, shining bubble of hers forever, because that’s the way things have always been.

Two years of absence have done nothing to change that.  Asseylum woke up in a different world that should for all accounts chew her up and spit her back out in a bloody package of skin and bones.

But no. The world still caters to her. Life isn’t fair.

Asseylum can fight from her pedestal, and Lemrina – damn it, Lemrina doesn’t know how to fight. She remembers being locked away in an empty room with an empty-eyed maid, remembers being carried, remembers falling from her wheelchair, and – she hates herself for not fighting back then.   She doesn’t know how to fight for herself, doesn’t know how to be more than a cripple with cursed blood flowing through her veins.

Now she has more, _is_ more, with her sister’s borrowed face and a borrowed title, with a borrowed husband and an inherited war. But it is falling to pieces now. She’s losing everything.

She finds that she doesn’t care, not really.

The whole damn world can burn, as long as Lemrina can hold onto a single person.

She knows its mostly futile.  After all, Slaine Troyard will never love her. She understands that. But no one ever told Lemrina that it was dangerous to build a home within a person.  No one ever cared enough to warn her about the fickle heart, the sick danger in constructing a home and hearth within the eyes and arms of another.  But its too late. She’s made her choice, and she’ll be damned before she gives this up. 

She calmly looks up into his eyes, and tells him that she has nowhere else to go.

Outside, the flashes of death and war twinkle like stars.

**Author's Note:**

> Critique welcome.


End file.
